Jolly Plumbing owner Barry Jolly is a well-respected entrepreneur with more than 31 years of experience in the plumbing business. He earned the Kentucky Small Business Man of the Year award in 1997, and went on to be awarded Mass Mutual’s prestigious Blue Chip Award . Here, Jolly explains what backflow prevention systems are and why they are so important.
Backflow prevention systems are important for people to have, and in recent years, these systems have become a hot topic that’s frequently discussed within the plumbing community. Before people can understand why backflow prevention systems are important, though, they have to first understand what backflow really is and why it’s so dangerous.
When water comes from the city lines inside your house, it comes in through your pipes. So the water enters into the piping system inside of the house, and that is normal. But a problem can come up sometimes because it is possible for the water that has come inside your home to siphon back out and go into the water main on the street. Something like that could definitely contaminate the main, and it is called backflow.
To use an example, let’s say you had a garden hose hooked up to a laundry tub inside your garage or in the laundry room in your house. So maybe you left that hose rolled up and sitting inside your laundry tub and then filled the laundry tub with sudsy water, because you weren’t thinking about the hose.
Well, if during the middle of that process, the city shut off the water for some reason out on the city main — like if there was a main break out on the city main, so they turned off everyone’s water for a certain time . Then what would happen is that the water would get siphoned right out of the laundry tub—and that is the sudsy water we are talking about, which would be contaminated and dirty — and go through the garden hose and back out into the city main. Suddenly, the city main has sudsy water in it. That is contamination of the water supply, and that could be a serious problem.
A backflow prevention system is supposed to stop that from happening, and the backflow preventer itself is a device that is placed next to the main shutoff valve in a building or home to do just that.
Although these types of problems are most common — and most troublesome — in factories and commercial building-type settings, they can also happen in people’s homes, which would obviously be a major problem. The only difference is that in a factory situation major chemicals or hazardous water could be getting siphoned back out into the system, which would be especially problematic.
These backflow preventers are put in place specifically to prevent anything like that from happening. They prevent the siphoning from happening inside a building, which therefore stops any water from going back out into the city main. Backflow preventers are so important in trying to prevent this, in fact, that many states now require that these backflow prevention systems to actually be tested by a licensed backflow tester once a year.
Here at Jolly Plumbing, we actually have several licensed backflow testers on staff, so that is how we know so much about it. Testing these backflow prevention systems is one of the big things that we do here at Jolly Plumbing.
Although few homeowners currently have these backflow prevention systems hooked up in their homes, the water companies are now becoming more and more invested in making sure that enough of these prevention systems are in place. Many water companies are building preventers into their water meters these days.
Because the water companies are building them into their own lines, this relieves a lot of the stress for the homeowner, since backflow preventers are now more likely to be a device that would be built into the water meter by the city rather than something that the homeowner needs to worry about having installed himself.
For the most part, the only people who need to worry about calling plumbers and having backflow prevention systems installed are those who own commercial buildings and factories, because this currently is still mostly a commercial type of issue and less of a consumer-focused problem.
